Reflections of a singular artist

Date: July 17 2013

Dewi Cooke, Deputy Arts Editor

Through the circle of a telephoto lens, a studio is revealed in glimpses. Inspiration boards pinned with images of the moon, of giant telescopes and complex engine diagrams are seen in snatches as the lens eye swings rhythmically in a blur of shape and movement.

It's a mesmerising peek into Turner Prize-winning artist Simon Starling's Copenhagen workspace although In Speculum (Studio Edit), his four-minute black-and-white video, is no straightforward portrait. As would be expected of the man who once motored a steamboat fuelled by wood from its own bow (the boat eventually sank, with him on it), there is more to this than fluctuating focal lengths and a sense of disorientation.

''The studio has always been a bit of an anomaly to me, I've never really known what to do with them and they are spaces to think and to gather images, material, text,'' Starling says. ''I just wanted to bring that idea into the show somehow, this kind of fractured hall of mirrors space that the studio kind of is for me.''

In Speculum, part of a survey of Starling's work opening this week at Monash University Museum of Art, has a local connection, too. The film itself is projected through the hole of the Great Melbourne Telescope's speculum mirror, an original piece from the 19th-century astronomical device that's being restored by Museum Victoria.

Starling was invited to come up with a commission for MUMA by former director (and current curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria) Max Delany, who introduced the Great Melbourne Telescope as a launch pad for their conversation.

''The history of astronomy in the 19th century he's established as being germane to the establishment of cinema,'' says Delany, who also commissioned Starling more than a decade ago to create a piece for Heide Museum of Modern Art. ''He was interested in using the speculum mirror as a kind of lens to turn the telescope back on itself.''

The result, as Starling describes, is a kind of cat-and-mouse game between Starling, manning a roaming concave mirror, and a former student, Maria von Hausswolff, trying to keep up with him as she films through a telephoto lens what he is reflecting back at her.

Unlike his previous two films, Black Drop and Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), which will be shown in the exhibition, In Speculum is a departure from his more informational work.

''I think one of the things I've been trying to do throughout my career is constantly undermine what becomes expected. After having made these two complex narrative films I really wanted to do something completely else,'' he says.

For a time, it might have seemed as though Starling would be defined by some of his more elaborate pieces. In his 2005 Turner Prize-winning work, Shedboatshed, he dismantled an old wooden shed and fashioned it into a boat that he paddled up the Rhine and then reassembled. In 2000, he rode a mountain bike to a bauxite mine in France, collected some bauxite rocks and later processed them into aluminium, which he used to create a cast of the same bike frame.

He has melted down an Eames chair and a Marin bicycle, using their materials to create new versions of each other, and he has had an original desk belonging to Australian writer Patrick White remade three times by different furniture makers (Three White Desks, which will be on show at Monash) with only a photograph of the original as a guide.

''I think in the beginning of my career it was very much about a singular activity about what was possible for one person, in a way. I built boats, I built radio-controlled aeroplanes, furniture, all sorts of things and slowly I suppose I got more interested in the idea of working with other craftsmen almost as sort of surrogates for the artist,'' he says. ''In this show there's a mask maker in Osaka who I filmed, we collaborated for nine months on this series of masks. There was a film editor as well, splicing film together. So it was almost like stepping outside the making process and reflecting back on that in some way.''

The MUMA show will be a rare opportunity to see Starling's works in the one venue, and uses as its starting point his 1999 piece for Heide, Le Jardin Suspendu, a remote-controlled model plane carved from an Ecuadorian balsa tree, the remnant logs of which are also on display. Among its references are the modernist architecture of the Heide II house as well as the trees in the gallery's grounds.

Its these qualities of background and story inherent in Starling's work that has made him one of the forerunners of ''research-based'' practice, says Patrice Sharkey, MUMA's assistant curator.

But Starling mulls the term ''research''. While he has taught art students at Frankfurt's Stadelschule for the past 10 years, he does not consider himself an academic in the traditional sense. Instead, any research he does is part of the art-making process itself.

''It's a lot to do with trying to ground the work and connect the work to the world and give a sense of testing things in the world rather than working in a studio and exhibiting.''

Simon Starling: In Speculum is at MUMA from July 18-September 21. Starling will give a lecture at NGV International on July 18 from 5.30pm.

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